Downloaded videos are corrupted

As per the title, often full of artifacts, sometimes completely unplayable. Coupled with the site's myriad video playback issues, it can be incredibly frustrating. With both downloads and video played via the site affected, surely there's a common cause.

To add insult to injury, this mostly only affects paid-for content - the videos hosted on YouTube play flawlessly.

@scab120: That's strange, thanks for reporting. No one else has reported issues, and we get a lot of video downloads. Curious what might be going on. Any video in particular you can't point me to? The one's I've tried work so far. Also, what OS/browser you on?

Hello scab120 this was happening to me too but I found out that one of my sticks of ram had bum chips.

Have you tried downloading/watching on a different computer?

Appreciate the replies.

It's not the memory - I've swapped in other sticks. I'm now suspicious of the NIC. Will find out tomorrow. I may have been hasty lumping this issue in with the others.

Oddly, switching browsers to try solve the corruption problem, I've noticed that downloads made using Firefox consistently fail at the very end. I'm sure I've read posts about this elsewhere (with a suggested fix)?

@scab120: Another thing to check of course, is your anti virus protection. Whitelists aren't good enough, you'll have to disable them completely. Same with any hardware/software firewalls. If you are on a corporate network, there can be other traffic shaping going on.